Electro-Voice sound for UK churches, from traditional to contemporary

Houses of worship, whether historic or modern in architecture, present unique challenges to sound system designers and installers. The point is illustrated by two recent UK installations from Creative Audio-Visual Solutions (CAVS), a design and integration firm in Hertfordshire that specializes in worship systems — two very different church projects, each built on Electro-Voice.

Frampton Park Baptist Church in East London is a new building that doubles as a gymnasium when not in use for worship. Both this and the Buckingham project feature amplified praise bands with multiple musicians and orchestral instruments. At Frampton Park, loudspeaker placement had to be restricted to the areas directly adjacent to the stage — kept clear during sports events and clear of the room's temporary wall system, which slides into place to close off the stage area.

CAVS system designer Ian Bethell and sales director Rob Alvis used a pair of Electro-Voice EVF-1122S full-range loudspeakers in a left/right configuration above the stage, each augmented by an Electro-Voice EVU-1082 mounted behind and angled to cover the side-stage areas. Bass enhancement comes from a pair of Electro-Voice EVF-1121S subwoofers mounted directly beneath the stage and altar area. Power is supplied by Electro-Voice CPS 2.9 and CPS 8.5 amplifiers, and six Electro-Voice ZXA1 powered stage wedges provide monitoring for the band.

“It's quite a reverberant space, so we avoided using 18-inch subs, which would be overpowering. Instead, we used the 12-inch EVF, which provides a nice punch with tight control of the low end. For the mains, we needed to cover a 15-metre throw, which the EVF-1122S handles with ease.” — Rob Alvis

Dating back to Saxon times, St Peter and St Paul's Church in Buckingham set out to modernize its sound system for today's worship style. Beyond clear, intelligible speech and the power for full-range music, the system needed a low-profile design that would not interfere with the building's historic architecture.

For this highly reverberant sanctuary, CAVS recommended a point-source approach using Electro-Voice ZX1i loudspeakers in a distributed system. A pair of these 8-inch, 2-way speakers is affixed to each of four pillars, with two more deployed high on the rear pillars to serve the balcony and a single ZX1i for the choir area. Because drilling into the original stone and marble was not an option, CAVS engineers devised a method of mounting both loudspeakers and video screens to the church pillars using custom band brackets that clamp around the columns without harm. Two floor-mounted Electro-Voice ZX1-Sub 12-inch subwoofers augment the low end from the worship band's bass and drum components. The ZX1 complement is powered by an Electro-Voice CPS 2.9 multichannel amplifier, with a CPS 8.5 handling the subwoofers.

“The ZX1 is a very flexible, high-fidelity design in a compact package, which was perfect for St Peter and St Paul.” — Rob Alvis

Both systems share signal processing and routing through the Electro-Voice NetMax N8000 system controller, which let CAVS tune each system as a whole and then optimize every loudspeaker component individually via FIR (finite impulse response) Drive. The NetMax digital signal processing engine provides equalization, dynamics, filtering, and crossover control.